[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rotary Phone Project
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Show HN: Rotary Phone Project
Author : mnutt
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-03-23 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ywain wrote:
| Very cool and fun project! Thanks for sharing.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Hell yes, I've been wanting to do this for years - maybe I'll
| finally pull the trigger and hook this up so my child can harass
| me telephonically after she's supposed to be in bed and asleep.
| :)
| tornquist wrote:
| Very cool project. I was really struck by this comment:
|
| > Dial out to a short list of family contacts. It's not something
| I think about much, but when I was a kid there was a phone on the
| wall and once I could reach it, I could use it. Now, if you're
| not old enough to have a cell phone, you also can't call anyone
| at all.
|
| That's not something I've ever thought about, but is a really
| huge change in what kids can do. I was always allowed to call
| over to a friend's house and see if they could play.
| eloisant wrote:
| I still have a landline. It comes from free with my fiber
| internet anyway, all I have to do is plug a phone.
|
| That's really handy for kids.
| jbaber wrote:
| This is why I got a landline.
| SamBam wrote:
| Another (weird) advantage of a landline: you didn't always know
| who was going to answer, sometimes you were just calling "the
| house," and it allowed for more serendipitous conversation.
|
| The main example is probably just calling up your parents,
| whether as a kid or even as an adult calling up their elderly
| parents. Sometimes you just want to speak to "your parents."
| You didn't have to decide whether to call mom's cellphone or
| dad's cellphone. And you didn't have to worry about who you
| called last. Heck, with caller ID, mom or dad could even decide
| who wanted to chat with you.
|
| My mother-in-law actually complains about this going the other
| way. Sometimes she just wants to call our house, because she'd
| love it if I randomly picked up and she could chat with me in
| passing. She'd find it awkward to call my phone, because we
| don't quite have that "chat about nothing on the phone"
| relationship, but it used to be that you could get two minutes
| of catching up with someone before you said "ok, now pass me to
| the person I was really calling for."
| limbero wrote:
| Wow, this is really cool, thanks for sharing. I've always liked
| the idea of a home phone, rather than personal phone, for all
| sorts of things that belong to the house and not me personally.
| This pushes it one step further, will definitely try it!
| abstractbill wrote:
| Nice project! Our house has something similar. Every room has its
| own rotary phone, with its own number (usually someone's
| birthday!). I think we have 7 or 8 total. They can't dial out or
| anything fancy like that, but they can all call each other. The
| kids mostly use it to call and ask us to bring snacks when
| they're playing, and we mostly use it to call them and ask them
| to come to dinner!
| mnutt wrote:
| My son _loves_ the train status aspect and I'm happy to oblige as
| it gives me an excuse to hack, but as other people point out you
| can get a lot of mileage out of even just getting a landline. Or
| you could probably connect the Grandstream directly to Twilio or
| another low-cost VoIP provider for cheaper than a land line and
| keep the ability to limit which phone numbers can be used.
|
| The project was delayed for a day for lack of a phone cable. (of
| all of the weird old cables I have somehow rj-11 is no longer one
| of them...) I considered buying one off Amazon but it felt
| incredibly wasteful, so instead I asked our IT department at
| work. Almost any office will have piles of these things sitting
| around collecting dust.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > my 4 year old son ... loves the subway, and is already pretty
| proficient at using a unix terminal to query the status of
| different trains
|
| Regardless of everything else there, I found this amazing
| mnutt wrote:
| ctrl-c was one of the first things I had to teach him :-)
|
| He has a Pi with a 7" touchscreen and keyboard, with xterm and
| a notes app. Compared to other technology it seems to be fairly
| self-limiting.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Nice, and the Grandstream adapter is good to know about. There is
| a gadget now called cell2jack that lets you use your old land
| phone as a mobile handset but going to VoIP is also interesting.
|
| Quite a while ago, Sparkfin sold a rotary phone that had been
| modified to have a mobile phone board inside, but it is now long
| obsolete:
|
| https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/287
|
| I still have an old rotary phone around, with the carbon granule
| mic those things had. It sounds awful. Idk whether that's due to
| its age, or because those mics just sounded bad compared with
| modern condenser mics.
|
| I have been thinking of getting a cell2jack to have a pseudo-
| landline at mom's, since there are people there who get confused
| by smart phones.
|
| This board also looks promising:
|
| https://www.keyestudio.com/products/keyestudio-raspberry-pi-...
|
| Unfortunately GSM modules in that style no longer work because
| the 2g and 3g networks are now shut down around here.
| mnutt wrote:
| That's great, I didn't know about those.
|
| For anything that an adult depended on, especially if I didn't
| live with them, I'd prioritize simplicity and robustness over
| almost everything else.
| Crunchified wrote:
| Take that carbon mic element and tap it repeatedly on a hard
| surface to loosen up the granules of carbon that need to be
| able to move round in there when you speak into it. You may
| find that it improves the fidelity noticeably.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| As a child growing up in the UK I was allowed to call up, each
| evening, the bedtime stories phone line run by British Telecom. I
| used to call that bedtime story phone line from an an old 1970's
| era rotary Snoopy telephone from British Telecom which I still
| own.
|
| I ever so carefully updated the phone with a new RJ-30 jack (the
| original was bare wires), so that in a custom built base that the
| phone sits on is an Nvidia Jetson running an LLM and trained on
| Charlie Brown's voice and a voice recognition model.
|
| Dialing 1 will answer questions about Snoopy and Peanuts history
| and Charles Schultz in Charlie Brown's voice. You can just talk
| to it. Dial 2 and a very nice lady with a British accent will
| read you a bedtime story, interactively, like a choose your own
| adventure of sorts, from a large database of stories. Dial 3 and
| Lucy will pick up, announce that the therapist is in, and talk
| with you about what's troubling you, again, voice recognition and
| an LLM. Dial 4 and you get Woodstock. Any other number gets you
| an "adult" from the Peanuts cartoon that is impossible to
| understand, again, voice recognition to understand what you're
| asking, but the response is unintelligible.
| mnutt wrote:
| That's amazing!
|
| I'm separately very interested in LLMs, but still very much in
| a "keep them the hell away from my kids" mindset.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now I wonder if any of the existing 4G gateways support pulse
| dialing.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| if not, pulse to dtmf sounds like a reasonably-approachable
| (attiny?) side project?
| newhotelowner wrote:
| That's very nice.
|
| --- You don't need an Asterisk server for basic things.
|
| You can connect HT8xx directly to a VOIP provider.
|
| Some VOIP providers like voip dot ms let you create extensions
| too.
| Muromec wrote:
| I straight out put RISC-V board into the retro-looking landline
| phone from ebay. Some soldering, a gpio-matrix keyboard (mine is
| a keypad and not a real pulse rotary) and baresip integration and
| it kinda works.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| For my mother's 80th birthday I put a little computer in an old
| rotary phone.
|
| I purchased a mobile phone number for a month with voicemail and
| set the voicemail to email me the messages.
|
| I asked all her friends and family to call the number and leave a
| message saying something meaningful to mum and wishing her happy
| birthday.
|
| I uploaded all the messages to an sd card and put the little
| computer in the phone and wired it up to the rotary dialer and
| wrote some python code which listened to the rotary dialer and
| played an mp3 on specific numbers.
|
| Dialling a number played back a message from a friend/family
| member.
|
| I later did the same thing for another family member but this
| time in an old radio and you could tune to different messages.
|
| I got the idea from Caroline Buttet who has some really creative
| and interesting things on her channel, such as a peephole that
| shows random open security cameras and a world globe that plays
| local radio stations when you touch a country.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@carolinebuttet7095
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder if one could build a bidirectional rotary dial, so that
| the higher digits don't have to take so much time. ;)
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